Personal communication, productivity, and entertainment devices such as cellular phones, PDAs, portable email devices, tablet computers, e-books, hand-held games, portable media players, etc. (all referred to hereafter as “smart devices”) are known to include features such as graphical user interfaces on color touch screens, Bluetooth and/or WiFi capability, etc. Increasingly, such smart devices also incorporate support for ancillary applications (hereafter referred to as “apps”) for example calendars, email, maps and navigation, etc. Such ancillary applications may be pre-installed in a smart device or may be made available for download by a user. Certain apps may comprise an ability to issue commands to entertainment and other appliances, for example in conjunction with a GUI offering the features and functionality of a universal remote control, as a user convenience in conjunction with a TV guide display to enable channel selection, etc.
In order to effect such control functionality, it is known in the art to provision a smart device with hardware and/or firmware suitable for the generation of appliance command signals. Provision of such hardware and/or firmware may be internal, i.e., built into a smart device; may be external, i.e., in the form of add-on attachments to a smart device; or may be discrete, i.e., in the form of a separate self-contained unit which receives wireless signals from a smart device and converts them to appropriate appliance command transmissions. In particular, it is known in the art to provide a single self-contained bridge device comprising for example a receiver, a processing/translation means, and a transmitter, which bridge device is capable of receiving generic appliance command requests from a smart device via, for example, an RF link such as Bluetooth or WiFi and translating these command requests into appliance-recognizable transmissions, these transmissions usually (but not necessarily) taking the form of infrared (“IR”) encoded signals which may emulate the various target appliances' original equipment remote controls. The availability of such bridge devices greatly facilitates the deployment of remote control apps for smart devices, since smart device apps intended for use in conjunction with these bridge devices may then comprise a simple software GUI with no requirement for additional hardware or firmware installed onto or built into the smart device. Known bridge devices, for example such as described in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/406,601, entitled “System and Method for Appliance Control Via a Personal Communication or Entertainment Device,” or U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/071,661, entitled “System and Method for Facilitating Appliance Control Via a Smart Device,” both incorporated herein by reference in their entirety, generally comprise a unitary “universal” bridge device, i.e., a device with access to a library of appliance command codes and transmission format information suitable for issuing wireless commands to multiple appliances of different type and manufacture. As described in the above referenced U.S. Patent Applications, an app resident on a smart device may communicate with such a bridge device in order to request the transmission of commands to various appliances, for example a television set, a set top box, a DVD player, and/or an AV receiver.
While such unitary bridge devices are operative for the purpose described, certain disadvantages remain. For example, since a unitary bridge device may be required to originate command transmissions to several different appliances, it must be positioned appropriately, especially in those cases where infrared (“IR”) is the required command transmission medium and the transmitter accordingly must be located within line-of-sight of every appliance to be controlled. This may constrain a user's ability to, for example, place equipment in cabinets behind closed doors; situate the bridge device where it is inconspicuous and/or not subject to interference by curious children or visitors, etc. Furthermore, since satisfying these constraints may require placement of a bridge device at some distance from the appliances to be controlled, for example on the opposite wall of a room, the design of such unitary bridge devices must provide for adequate transmission output power with the resultant impact on battery life, device dimensions, power supply design, and the like.